Political Islam:
Essays from Middle East Report

Joel Beinin + Joe Stork (editors)

The term "fundamentalism" is problematic enough at the best of times;
the combination with "Islamic" is badly abused. The individuals and
movements to which it is commonly applied are driven by concerns that
are principally secular and political rather than religious (let alone
theological). Hence Beinin and Stork's choice of Political Islam as
the title for their collection of articles on Islamist politics in the
Middle East. This contains twenty six essays and interviews (mostly
taken from Middle East Report) divided into five thematic sections,
along with introductions to each section and to the volume as a whole.

The subject of the first section is the relationship of Islam to civil
society and democracy. A historiographical essay sets the tone for the
whole volume with an attack on essentialist approaches to Islam and
neo-Orientalist claims that it is inherently antithetical to
democracy. This external view is complemented by an essay on Islamic
notions of democracy. There are two essays on the situation in Egypt:
one describes the actual balance between civil society — in the form
of professional associations, religious and secular organisations, and
private enterprise — and the state, the other the ideological debate
over the status of the shari`a and the political role of Islam. And
an interview with one of the editors of Middle East Report presents a
feminist view of issues raised by the application of Western notions of
civil society to the Arab world.

Four of the essays in part two describe attempts by Islamist movements
to gain control of the state: the "Islamic Republic" in Iran (and the
extent to which it should in fact be called Islamic), the Reform party
in Turkey, the Muslim Brothers and the Islamic Trend in Egypt, and Hizb
Allah in Lebanon. Two essays look at economic questions: one is a
broad overview of Islamist economics, the other a study of the role of
finance in the rise to power of the Sudanese National Islamic Front.

Section three (on gender relations) begins with an overview of the
relationship between women, Islam and the state. Two essays describe
how wearing of the hijab became a political issue in Gaza and
Algeria. An essay on family planning in Iran illustrates the
essentially pragmatic stance of the Islamic Republic on women's issues,
with debates over reproductive choices motivated by political and
economic considerations. The section concludes with a study of women
leaders within Sudan's National Islamic Front.

Two of the essays in section four are about popular culture in the
narrow sense: one is on the role of Rai and Rap music in French Arab
youth identity and the other on the changing portrayal of Islam in
drama serials on Egyptian television. Another essay and an interview
explore grassroots mobilisation by the FIS in Algeria, in the struggle
over public space at the local neighbourhood level and in the
contestation of patriotic myths about the independence struggle. The
final section, "Movements and Personalities", contains interviews with
an Egyptian academic denied tenure after accusations of heresy, the
leader of the Egyptian al-Gama`a al-Islamiyya (responsible for attacks
on tourists), and a Tunisian intellectual, along with essays on the
rise of Hamas in Gaza and the Shi`i movement in Lebanon.

With their focus on individual countries, leaders, and movements, the
works in Political Islam do an admirable job of capturing the
complexity, diversity, and historical specificity of Islamist
politics. Though the interviews provide some variety, the essays are
scholarly — most have full references and a majority of the
contributors are academics. They avoid jargon, however, and assume
neither background knowledge nor complex theoretical frameworks: the
result is accessible to the educated layperson with a general knowledge
of Middle Eastern politics. I only wish that writing of this quality
— and intelligence — were more common in newspapers and magazines.